Message flooding within a communication system is well known. In particular, the message flooding procedure is often the basis of on-demand route discovery and network initialization. Message flooding is basically defined as a broadcast procedure covering a complete network. It operates as follows: When a node, or remote unit, in a network wishes to discover a route to another node in the network a message is broadcasted to all of its neighbors without specifying the destination address. Upon receiving the message, all of the neighboring nodes will rebroadcast the message to their neighbors. When a node receives the same message again, it discards it. The procedure repeats itself until all of the nodes in the network are reached. As discussed, the purpose to flood the network in a routing algorithm is essentially to find a path to send data to destinations or draw data from the sources. The message content is usually a request of route discovery.
Although message flooding is a dependable way to find a path within the network, flooding is proven to be the most expensive type of communication in wireless networks due to its broadcasting nature. The redundant broadcast caused by overlapping coverage amongst neighboring nodes wastes system resources, energy, and contributes to the excessive collisions. The redundant broadcast is more critical when executing flooding in a low-duty cycle mode because of the short communication windows and the use of coordination devices to schedule communications. In addition, a densely-deployed topology is another key factor to motivate the search for a new solution to address the redundant rebroadcast. Therefore, a need exists for a method and apparatus for message flooding within a communication system that minimizes redundant broadcasts caused by overlapping coverage.